EFFECTIVE SOLUTIONS FOR BUSINESSES

The Smartest Investment You Can Make To Save Fuel and Reduce Pollution

Thermagine's solutions capture, store and recover waste heat from all industrial processes that either require heat in the production of their products, or produce heat as a by-product of the production process. Our solutions allow a manufacturing plant to substantially reduce its energy consumption, not only by saving fuel costs by up to 50%*, but also increasing the lifetime of existing components and reducing maintenance.

Our solutions cater to either continuous or discontinuous industrial manufacturing processes that have waste heat in the form of either:

Steam or Thermal Oil between 100C - 350C (212F - 662F), or

Hot Air or Flue Gas between 100C - 500C (212F - 932F).

For industrial and solar thermal applications that utilize steam or thermal oil as the heat transfer fluid in the 100C - 350C range, Thermagine offers a newly developed compact, economical, high-performance, isothermal storage device - the Thermacitor, that is up to 1/10th the size of conventional heat storage solutions within the same temperature range. This allows:

A significant reduction in an industrial steam boiler's energy usage at peak load, especially in discontinous (batch) processes; and

Cost-effective heat storage for deploying solar thermal solutions for industrial processes or cooling, either as buffer storage or longer-term storage.

Some examples of manufacturing processes where Thermagine's solutions can be used:

Bulk Chemical Production and Refining

In detergents and cosmetics production, non-ionic tensides are used extensively. These are produced from the alkoxylation of fatty alcohols and acids in a batch-wise (discontinuous) process. The production of tensides requires large amounts of steam to operate the bach reactors, as well as to maintain the correct temperatures for the storage of the raw materials.

The alkoxylation process is strongly exothermic, and cooling towers are built in most plants to remove the heat to the environment, where it is wasted.

As an alternative, Thermagine's Thermacitor can be used to collect the exothermic heat of the reaction from one batch, store it, and then use this heat for pre-heating the reactants in the next batch. Substantial energy savings can be achieved without any modification of the process conditions.

In the production of artificial sandstone and concrete blocks, large amounts of steam are required for the most energy-intensive stage of the brick production - steam curing.

The raw bricks are precured in a mould, then placed in an autoclave in a steam atmosphere pressurized to 16 bars, where they are cured for 8-12 hours at temperatures of between 130C - 200C (266F - 392F). The cured bricks are then cut into blocks or plates.

In some plants, waste heat from the curing process is stored as steam in large steel tanks (steam accumulators), which are large, costly and thermally inefficient, whilst in others, the excess steam is simply vented into the atmosphere. A Thermacitor can 3X the power density per unit volume compared to a steam accumulator, whilst occupying only 1/3 the size of a steam accumulator.

Food and Beverage Production

Thermagine can help reduce the energy costs involved in most food and beverage production, involving either continuous or batch processes.Typical processes where our solutions can be used are: Cleaning, drying, evaporation, distillation, blanching, pasteurisation, sterilisation, cooking and baking.

Any food and beverage processes that have waste heat that is in excess of 100C (212F) can benefit from Thermagine's solutions.

Solar Thermal for Industrial Processes & Cooling

The Thermacitor system has the capability to store solar heat within the 100C - 350C (212F - 662F) range economically and effectively. The system can work with either steam or oil based heat transfer fluids (HTFs).

The core of the system is an integrated heat-exchanger and phase-change-material (PCM) system that has both an excellent thermal capacity and an outstanding heat-transfer rate, thanks to the latest advances in thermal engineering.

The system is isothermal and compact, and can be used either as buffer storage to "fill-in" for solar transients during daytime operation, and can also be used for longer term storage, extending the operation of a solar thermal field well into the night or overnight. The system can be built to store its charge for days if required.

Capacities are available in increments of 50 kWh (0.17 MMBtu), up to 600 kWh (2 MMBtu) at present. Future systems are being planned which will be scalable to larger sizes.

*Disclaimer: The amount of energy savings is strongly dependent on the type of manufacturing process and the physical layout of the plant. Each plant and application has characteristics that are unique to itself. In order to have an initial evaluation on your plant done, please fill out the regular questionnaire or solar thermal questionnaire and send it back to us.